Graffiti Around Town


A friend, who is on the board of directors, invited me to help set up and serve Thanksgiving dinner at the Latin American Youth Center. I took this afternoon off instead of tomorrow afternoon and helped out. I met several inspiring people and many kids who like cookies.
There’s a lot of art on the walls and some poetry. This reminded me of how grateful I am for what I have and where I am in life.

Only after walking along the two lane streets in a sari and sandals, sharing the road with exhaust-fume spewing buses, three-wheelers, motorcycles, mopeds, bicycles, cows, goats, dogs, street vendors, and pedestrians amidst dust, puddles, sewage, potholes, cowpats, dog shit, goat turds, and piles of organic and non-biodegradable trash, could one understand how a campaign to end the practice of littering would link it to evil. Thanks to my fellow traveler Eric for pointing out this sign.
For me “untitled” as the “title” of a work of art means that the image speaks for itself and that to name it would be to bind the viewer from access to a “pure” and open response of his/her own.
In the yoga philosophy much is made of the fact that any attempt to describe mystical (for want of a better word) experience already veils or distorts the experience and that which has been experienced.
Sometimes, then, I show what I cannot say in words, recognizing that the camera, too, alters and separates the viewed and the viewer.
Jnanam bandaha, by the way, is the second sutra in the Siva Sutras and means roughly, knowledge is bondage. Later in the text, we are also told that knowledge alone liberates. It is a delicious paradox for contemplation.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.